Friends Two women have amazing unbreakable bond after sex abuser tried to wreck their lives
Something finally snapped and I realised I had to speak out
IT took Rachel Brown four decades to report her adoptive dad to police for sexually abusing her as a child.
But after seeing him jailed, the 50-year-old mum is at long last putting the past behind her.
And it is partly thanks to forging a close friendship with a woman whose life was also wrecked by the pervert.
She and Angela Lawson, 46, were put in touch by a mutual friend after paedophile Geoffrey Auton was finally caged.
They began messaging and calling one another, finding comfort in sharing their experiences.
Last week the pair – who both have three children – had their first, emotional meeting at Rachel’s home in Darlington, Co Durham.
Rachel, a beautician, said: “Like me, Angela’s life has been turned upside down. We just connected.”
Spiritualism
Gripping Rachel’s hand, Angela, 46, said: “We have become friends for life. I already call her sis and I’m just so glad we found one another.”
Rachel spent her early years in children’s homes after being abused by her birth mother.
When she was six she was placed with a new family – and her adoptive mother was warm and loving.
But her adoptive father Auton forced her to watch porn and perform sex acts on him when she was ten.
Rachel said: “I was too young to understand how wrong it was and for many years thought it was normal.
“But he always warned me never to tell my mum because she would leave him and I would be thrown back into a children’s home.
“The thought of losing my lovely mum, who I adored with all my heart, was enough of a threat to never reveal what Dad was doing to me.”
The weekly abuse only ended when Rachel was 16 and her dad started studying spiritualism. But her suffering didn’t end there. She developed anorexia and bulimia and tried to kill herself with an overdose of painkillers aged 20.
She said: “When my brother and other relatives asked me why I had tried to kill myself, I told them Dad had abused me. Despite their pleas for me to go to the police, I refused. It would break Mum’s heart.”
Incredibly, Rachel began to forgive her dad a few years later.
She said: “Time had passed and beyond everything he had done to me, he was still my dad. I know people will struggle to understand why but I still loved him.”
When Rachel’s mum, Geraldine, died of cancer in 2015, aged 68, she took care of her dad. But when he found a new love, everything changed.
Rachel said: “Within weeks of losing Mum he spoke about needing another partner to look after his sexual needs.
“Very quickly he moved another woman in. I was absolutely devastated. I hadn’t even had time to grieve. I told Dad to watch he wasn’t taken advantage of financially and we had a huge argument. “He got very defensive and told me to ‘butt out’. I left the family house in floods of tears, devastated by how cruel Dad could be after everything I’d done to help him. “Ten weeks later, when he hadn’t got in touch, something finally snapped inside me. A rage I’d suppressed for years boiled up and everything he had put me through rose to the surface again. “It was then I realised I had to speak out and my dad couldn’t get away with what he had done to me.” While police were investigating the case last January, Auton met another partner via the dating website Plenty Of Fish. She was called Margaret – the mother of Angela. Within a week Margaret